Faculty members from the University of Minnesota and other Midwest and East Coast universities received a grant to fund studies on dementia intervention, according to a Sept. 16 press release from the School of Public Health.

The EMBRACE Center is led by researchers across the country, including School of Public Health professor Joseph Gaugler. The center is funding studies about interventions in dementia care and why they work.

The Center received a $5.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to fund the studies, according to the press release.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, around 6.9 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s dementia. The disease became America’s sixth leading cause of death in 2019.

Intervention care is a program that improves the health and quality of life for a person with dementia and their caregivers, Gaugler said. Implementing interventions into treatment can be expensive and difficult.

“(Interventions are) often so unwieldy, it’s so complex, it requires so much training, it’s so costly,” Gaugler said. “That makes it very, very hard for home and community-based settings or other organizations to adopt those interventions and integrate them into their everyday practice.”

Gaugler said understanding why interventions work will open doors for those with dementia and their caregivers.

“If you know how or why an intervention works, what essential elements are, then when one tries to scale an intervention, make it fit into a given cultural context, organizational context, changes can be made where you still keep the essence of the intervention,” Gaugler said.

Gaugler said maintaining why the intervention works and how it works allows other changes around that to be more palatable. He added it still allows the intervention to benefit the people it was meant to.

The EMBRACE Center is already funding two studies, one by University professor Manka Nkimbeng, and another from a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Nkimbeng said her study will delve into the health and well-being of caregivers in Black and African American communities around the U.S.

African American communities, including Black immigrants, are typically diagnosed with dementia later than white people, Nkimbeng said. This makes it harder for caregivers to adequately attend to their family member with dementia as they have limited access to different services. 

“Our work is really taking account that the care partners of this group have limited access to services, and then also the care partners of this group typically prefer to provide care for their relatives,” Nkimbeng said. “So our intervention is taking those things into account. How do we ensure that they are taking care of themselves as well as they provide care for the relative dimension?”

Laura Gitlin, co-investigator of the EMBRACE Center and professor at Drexel University, said the center will provide support for researchers beyond funding, such as webinars and consultations, to help keep the projects on track.

As the studies progress, Gitlin said the goal is to determine what parts of different interventions work so they are easy to implement in the home and in memory care facilities.

“This is all about intervention science and doing the best interventions that can maximize impact and be sustained,” Gitlin said. “Meaning it can be continued and embedded in sites and service settings and be sustained after the conclusion of a study.”

Giltin said interventions can be costly, another reason they are difficult to implement.

“Some interventions are complex and have different components to them,” Gitlin said. “We don’t know if all those components are necessary. They drive up costs when an agency tries to implement them.”

Understanding how the interventions work is integral to memory care, Gitlin said.

“If we understand that, then it can hopefully lead to adoption of those interventions by different healthcare settings, community-based settings because they would know what’s most critical to replicate,” Gitlin said.

The EMBRACE Center is one of the first memory care research centers allowing for collaboration across institutions in the country, Gitlin said.

“The investigators are working in very high, different, diverse groups, geographically, regionally, race, ethnically, language, language-wise, need-wise,” Gitlin said. “So it really brings great heterogeneity and diversity to understanding dementia care and what are the preferred approaches and benefits for different communities.”